Abstract
In the past decades, empirical research has established the importance of landmarks in our understanding of and communication about space. These findings have led to the development of several computational approaches for the automatic identification and integration of landmarks in navigation instructions. However, so far this research has failed to make any impact on commercial services. This chapter will discuss reasons for this failure. It will develop a categorization of existing approaches and highlight their shortcomings. Finally, principles and methods of user-generated content will be identified as a promising, feasible way forward to future landmark-based navigation services.
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Notes
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Often, however, this is done without taking into account the presence of other traffic lights. It is not uncommon to get instructions, such as ‘in 500 m, at the traffic lights, turn left,’ with another set or two of traffic lights before the one referred to.
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Accessed on March 29, 2010.
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To get a better idea of what this means: if landmark candidates were evenly distributed across Australia, there would be roughly 200 candidates within the area of Melbourne, or about 1 feature every 45 km2.
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Acknowledgments
A first draft of this chapter was written while the author was at the School of Information Science, The University of Pittsburgh. The ideas presented in the outlook greatly benefited from discussions at the School with Stephen Hirtle, Sherry Koshman, Hassan Karimi and Peter Brusilovsky, as well as later on with Stephan Winter at the University of Melbourne. Martin Tomko provided further feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter. The author received support for attending the meeting in Las Navas from the Transregional Collaborative Research Center SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition which is funded by the DFG. Feedback by the participants of that meeting, especially Martin Raubal, is also gratefully acknowledged.
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Richter, KF. (2013). Prospects and Challenges of Landmarks in Navigation Services. In: Raubal, M., Mark, D., Frank, A. (eds) Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34359-9_5
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